Change at the Precipice: The Day the Earth Stood Still

Judging from the low rating of my local paper's movie review and the trailers on T.V., I expected "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to be no more than a blockbuster sci-fi remake (of an original I hadn't seen) with action, special effects, and both intellectual and emotional shallowness. In other words, it was just what I was looking for on my birthday. Imagine then my surprise when the movie delivered, albeit in a very limited way, a plausible viewpoint for extraterrestrials, and a potential solution to the existential crisis we have precipitated by our wholesale destruction of other species.

Superficially, the premise has been repeated in many other movies: Aliens visit the Earth, presenting a potential threat to humanity. In this case, a community of extraterrestrial civilizations is concerned about the destruction of one of the few life-bearing planets in the Universe by one of the planet's species -- us. Representatives are sent here to determine whether or not we will reform ourselves; and if not, to collect samples of other species for preservation and to eliminate us.

The chief representative, played with easy stoicism by Keanu Reeves, comes to the same conclusion that cynical environmentalists have reached in reality, that we humans are driven by our nature to kill or enslave every other living thing, and can only be stopped by force. This conclusion is fortified by ultimately futile attempts by the U.S. defense apparatus to aggressively interrogate and then kill the aliens.

Fortunately for humanity, an astrobiologist (in another of Jennifer Connelly's excellent roles) takes a more friendly approach, assuming the best instead of the worst about the aliens. She learns with the help of an ethicist friend (John Cleese) that the representative's own species escaped extinction by reforming itself in the face of a cosmic threat to its existence. She then tries to convince him that, facing a similar "precipice," we should also have a chance to change ourselves.

The fact is that not enough people are yet willing to acknowledge or accept responsibility for the global extinction that we are causing. There are likely no aliens to force us into awareness or action. The consequences will be no less cataclysmic than the aliens' wrath; though it will take years, rather than hours, for us to be neutralized. If we are to change, we must understand the precariousness of our condition without outside help, and step back from the precipice voluntarily before it's too late.